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Wednesday, 31 December 2014

I've been flirting with the idea of starting a new blog for the past couple of weeks - stolen looks at my laptop keyboard from across the room, fantasies about beautiful photo posts with saucy depth of field - and then today it occurred to me that I probably already had a blog floating somewhere in the internet wilderness. I quickly Googled myself (cheeky) and there it was! A sad little blog with a few posts from last year. Sorry, blog. I let you down. I'm here to redeem myself. Would you like a chocolate truffle?

I'm rubbish at writing. I rarely do it anymore, except when I'm scribbling down half-formed scripts to turn into videos. When I was younger I used to keep a diary, and write lots of very thinly-vieled rip-off novels about wizarding academies. At uni at least I was forced to bang out a few thousand words every couple of weeks to maintain my gentlewoman's 2:1. Now I've got a full time job that keeps me out of the house from 7am - 7pm, I do little chunks of freelance work, I make two YouTube videos a week and on top of that I try to maintain a social life and put aside an hour every Monday to watch Kourtney and Khloe Take the Hamptons. It's all go go go.

If I'm ever going to achieve my dream of becoming a millionaire off the back of my outstandingly successful feminist pirate novels, I've got to get a move on and give this writing thing another go. I don't do New Year's resolutions really, but I do like goals, however small. Here are my goals for next year:

Saturday, 14 September 2013

The education system in this country taught me how to memorise information briefly for tests and exams, and then to forget it again immediately as I'd never need it again. It taught me that teachers can be as cruel and vindictive as they want, because they have the ultimate power to trash your grades and ruin your educational life. My grammar school in particular taught me that no grade other than an A counted - and even when I got an A, they wanted to know why on earth I didn't get an A*.

School, sixth form college and university definitely did teach me useful stuff, of course - they taught me how to make friends, speak in public, work to a deadline, fear authority and to change my writing style to fit in with marking standards that changed completely from teacher to teacher. University in particular taught me that it didn't matter how much time and passion I put into a piece of work. If the lecturer marking it this week didn't like my sentence structures, all my hard work would be for nothing. It taught me that life isn't fair. If I sound bitter about this, it's because I am a little - but I know that it's actually a really important skill to be able to manipulate how you work to fit different people's criteria. It was just a bit of a nasty wake-up call.

I think that there should be so much more to school than memorising the contents of text books to regurgitate in exams. In 21 years of education, I was never taught any of the following:

How to do taxes

How mortgages work

How loans from banks and lending companies work

How to fix basic appliances

How to build anything

How to deal with conflict

Basic first aid

Sex education beyond the physical

Any history that reflected poorly on England (aka ... most of history)

How to write a CV

How to write a covering letter

How to prepare for a job interview

Basic legal skills and how contracts work

How to deal with bullying

How to deal with mental health issues

How to cook basic meals

How to manage money and budget

How to cope with family illness/bereavement

Basic self defence

How to deal with sexism, racism, homophobia etc.

How to vote

Who the major political parties are and their policies

How local councils work and where tax money goes

You might think that it's not up to schools to teach kids any of these things, but I think that they're so massively vital and the sorts of things that you really can't rely on all parents/guardians to teach their children, because they're clearly not doing it. The internet is obviously a huge help, but there's so much conflicting information out there that there are no definitive guides. I loved taking art, history and English classes and I don't want to do away with existing subjects - but I do think that we need to massively revamp the education system to include the sorts of life skills that almost everyone needs, but that nobody is guaranteed to be taught.

Sunday, 8 September 2013

I'm a sucker for glitter nail varnish, even though it's a bitch to get off. There's something very therapeutic about layering it up until your nails look like Ke$ha threw up on them. This is Rocket from the Models Own Fireworks collection, it reminds me of bonfires and funfairs and Christmas. In the photo above I've used just the glitter varnish on my thumb, on my index finger it's over Barry M's Indigo, and on my middle finger it's over Barry M's Blood Orange. Glitter varnishes are hard to photograph well because they're always catching the light too much for you to get an accurate picture of what they look like, but I absolutely love this one, especially over Indigo. Excuse the circular scar on my finger - that's what happens when a collapsable chair collapses on your hand and a nail goes through your finger. Yum. Anyway - BOOM, reviewed.

There's definitely a weird freedom that comes along with writing on a blog that hasn't been advertised to my Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers or even my parents (they'll find it though, the wily minxes). I'm free to be absolutely crap at writing, because for now I'm writing myself rather than for an audience. I could tell you all my deepest darkest secrets. I could write emo poetry. This blog is my oyster.

The past five months have been absolutely ridiculous. Over Easter I visited a friend interning in Amsterdam, then once I'd finished uni (gulp) I took a long-weekend trip to Paris with my housemate. After that I spent 2 weeks in Croatia with my family, followed very quickly by 12 days in California. I got back from my Save the Children trip to Jordan a couple of days ago, and after 24 hours at home re-packed my suitcase and jumped in the car for the 6-hour drive to St Ives. We're here in Cornwall for a week, and then I'll be back on the job-hunt for a couple more weeks before my second Save the Children trip to New York. I always wanted to spend my last summer "as a child" galavanting around the country and the world, but never got round to planning it properly - somehow it managed to happen all by itself, and I'm so grateful. Before it began I worried about wasting my last summer of freedom, looking at my calendar and imagining days and days spent lying around in my pyjamas refreshing Twitter and over-eating, but actually there's been very little time for that sort of nonsense.

Now that I'm on my sixth trip and the seventh isn't far away (like I said, RIDICULOUS) the real world looms. I've been applying for jobs like a woman possessed, and forgive me for tooting my own horn (rude) but I actually feel very qualified to run social media/online content for a company or a charity. It comes so naturally to me because it's already such a big part of my life, and I've also got the sense to know how to apply that knowledge professionally. Ideally I want to work for a charity, because although jobs in television used to be my goal and have always seemed super glam and fun, my real calling in life is to do things that very visibly change other people's for the better. Unfortunately I haven't exactly had job offers ~pouring~ in, but I refuse to give up hope. I am valuable and employable. Evanna Lynch once told me that she liked my hair. I can do this.

It's a beautiful day and I'm still in my jim jams so it's probably time to stop hiding in my room blogging and slip into some short shorts to take St Ives by storm. I've already staged a little coup and convinced my family that despite the abundance of breakfast cereal in our kitchen, tomorrow we'll be getting up at the crack of 10am and going in search of a full English breakfast (and a vegan version for me). Viva la hash browns!

Friday, 23 August 2013

I'm a big believer in keeping blogs and diaries but I'm very crap at actually doing so myself. Recently I've been applying for jobs in the social media/digital marketing area and a lot of employers are looking for somebody who can use blogging sites. Although I kept a number of blogs during my teenage years, I've abandoned them all and made as many of them private as possible to stop my 16-year-old self's ramblings from embarrassing totally professional 21-year-old me. I tried to start a WordPress blog but I'm still stubbornly faithful to Blogger for reasons unknown ... so here we are. Let's do this thang.